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Rafael caught my eye with a tweet during an Embarcadero conference in Brazil back in October 2014. The reason... he'd just released a game for Android that had been written with Delphi using FireMonkey. So, I thought I'd drop him a line.

Q: Please could you tell us a little bit about yourself?A: I live in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Until June of this year, I worked at Rio for the state government as the principal Senior Software Architect, but now I'm doing home office for a private enterprise and playing much more with my children

Q: How long have you been using Delphi?A: I use Delphi since its first version. Actually, I use Pascal since my first time in the university with the Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5. A two 1.44 MB floppy pack. I choose to use it because it was a natural evolution and, of course, much better than VB! Since Delphi 1, I've never used another pascal tool because all the work I had to do with the Windows environment. I used Kylix for a short period and it was a shame that Borland had to end that project.

Q: Have you considered using FreePascal?A: Since my primary job concern was to build a base framework and component packages for about 30 Delphi programmers for a long time I didn't need to search for compiler alternatives. But I did hear a lot about Free Pascal, mainly a certain time after Borland gave up the Kylix project.

Q: How are you finding the cross platform features of Delphi?A: It's simply great! I feel myself like a child at the kindergarten.

Q: Tell us a little bit about your gameA: My Game is a classic Memory Game. I did it for my 1 year and 9 months year old boy, with two concerns in mind: from the child perspective: straightforward to play with no ads and no levels, and from the parent's perspective: no worries about getting to take the game back from the ads and about having to always say things like "don't touch here" and "Oh! What is that? No, the ad again!".
The child have just to turn the cards, match the pictures and receive applauses when it's all done! And the parents can have an instant of peace!

Everyone can start to play with no instructions. I always see my son doing like that, and you can see it too: just watch the promotion video published with the app in Google Play.

Q: Why only Android?A: It is just because I'm new to the Mac world and I did something terrible wrong with a Mac Mini, that I borrowed from a friend of mine, that made a simple "hello world" not to run on its iPhone simulator!

But I will probably publish it in the App Store in the next weeks. MacInCloud is a good option if you have a good internet connection. And that is not my case. A 5 MB broadband internet is not enough to upload a 30 MB debug image! So, for me, it's not viable using it now.

Q: How have you found the whole process of getting your app on the store?A: The process is straightforward, since you have all the design materials. And that was the most time consuming to me. Getting all that images sized to match their requirements was the worst part, I'm not a designer. I had to learn to use a design tool and that took me a lot of the time. But, once you have all done, the feeling is of accomplishment!

The game has been added to the list of Pascal games here, and is available on the Google Play store here.

I totally agree, that's why I use Lazarus + FPC because it not only produces binaries for Mac, IOS and Android, it also runs natively on OSX, Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OS/2, Solaris, Dos, plus half a dozen other platforms and can additionally produce binaries for Mips + PowerPC systems as well as Gameboy Advance, Gameboy DS (and others), the PS3, the Java virtual machine and embedded platforms.

that's the way *compilers* should be and I'm not paid to say that either